Friday, 26 April 2013

A propos of nothing (2)

One of the fishing books I've read recently is Tony Taylor's Fishing The River Of Time (Text Publishing, 2012). It came with good reviews, and its central proposition - a Sydney-based geologist, teaching a grandson to fish in Canada, while gently encouraging the wider perspectives that fishing brings - was a good one. It didn't hit home especially well with me, but give it a go for yourselves and see if you feel differently.

Along the way (p195) I was amused to read that "Recently, we have become preoccupied with wealth" - I'll give him that one, maybe we have - "and have become enamoured with a pseudo-science called economics that seems to be only concerned with the 'growth' of a convenient but impractical thing called money".

Even from someone with a low opinion of economics, that's an inadequate description. And it reminded me that the giants of the profession have typically had rather more realistic and down to earth ideas of what economics is about. As Keynes said (Essays In Persuasion, 1931), " If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people, on a level with dentists, that would be splendid!"

No comments:

Post a Comment

Welcome to my economics blog

“The remarkable thing about economics is that once you've been exposed to the big ideas, they begin to show up everywhere … Economics offers insight into wealth, poverty, gender relations, the environment, discrimination, politics...How could that possibly not be interesting?” - Charles Wheelan, Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science, 2002

"The soundest argument for markets ... is simply that, very frequently, they are the least bad of the alternatives. To paraphrase Winston Churchill's remark on democracy, markets are the worst form of resource allocation, except for all the others that have been tried" - Prof George Yarrow, Three Lectures on Privatization, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, April 1990

"And if there's one thing we've learned about flawed markets, it's that people flee from them, either physically or by resorting to back channels and black markets. Either way, flawed markets can undermine not just communities but whole nations" - Alvin Roth, Who Gets What - and Why, 2015

"Economic controversy is generally a thankless task. You cannot hope to make any impression on your opponent. Yet he is the only reader on whose interest you can count" - Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, Economic Journal, 1898

"There is some evil genius which sits at the elbow of every economist, forcing him into all sorts of contorted and unnecessary complications" - John Maynard Keynes, letter to Roy Harrod, August 1935

"We are here and it is now. The way I see it is, after that, everything tends towards guesswork" - the philosopher Didactylos, in Terry Pratchett's Small Gods, 1992

"I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observations of those who were much inferior in understanding to the person who took the lead in the business" - the blogger's creed, as foreshadowed by Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790

"They acted as their situation naturally directed, and they who have clamoured the loudest against them would probably not have acted better themselves" - advice to Twitterati, as foreshadowed by Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Book IV, 1776